Final Thoughts About My Tenure and The Times’s Future

AS I conclude my tour of duty as the second public editor of The New York Times, here are some final thoughts and concerns about the paper and its journalism that flow from what I’ve observed over the past two years from my perch outside the newsroom.

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The Times is an exceptional newspaper, notwithstanding the questions I have raised as public editor. You, the reader, receive a newspaper that is unrivaled in its breadth and consistency. But upholding the paper’s tradition of great journalism is costly. The Times doesn’t dispute the recent intimation by Donald E. Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company, that The Times’s yearly news budget is more than $200 million, despite the cost cutting of the past few years.

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How The Times deals with two major strategic challenges will determine the quality of the news readers get in the years ahead. The challenges, which also face most other newspapers, are lagging advertising revenue and the transition to the Web.

Generating the revenue to pay for the news staff needed to maintain The Times’s high quality is the most serious challenge. With advertising revenue from the print paper weakening in recent years, the hope was that growing revenue from advertising on the Web site would pick up the slack. Unfortunately, as The Times reported April 20, the paper has “decided to reduce its 2007 guidance for Internet revenue growth, suggesting that the transition from a print advertising model may be a long time coming.”

The transition of the newsroom’s center of gravity to the Web, crucial to the future of The Times, is making notable progress. But the steady push to completely integrate its print and online news operations to support the rapidly expanding Web site raises questions about what will constitute top-quality journalism in the online world of deadlines every minute. A pilot project under way in the business section seeks to truly integrate the print and online operations on a 24/7 basis. In a vital step forward and a distinct plus for Web readers, the pilot tests the idea of making the editor of a core news department of the print paper responsible for the coverage online as well.

The Times’s effort to do more with the same size news staff, and do it 24 hours a day, requires workload decisions that can affect quality, especially in editing.

Editing lapses, among both the so-called backfield editors who shepherd and shape stories and the copy editors who pore over articles detail by detail, have been a recurring theme in my columns. Often the problem was that, even on non-deadline stories, editors didn’t have enough time to spot problems and ask questions. A major part of the paper’s “Reinventing the Newsroom” pilot project involves getting reporters to file stories throughout the day for more rapid posting on the Web. In theory, spreading out the flow of stories that used to arrive right at the evening print deadline could give editors more time to make articles better. I worry, however, that the combination of having to update stories appearing on the Web and continued financial pressure to maintain current staffing numbers could leave both the quality and the theory bruised.

Doing more with the same size staff of reporters also has implications for the quality of the reporting. Times reporters are now being trained and pushed to quickly prepare video and audio supplements to their articles for the Web version of the paper. With the expanding commitment to get stories online as soon as they are good enough to post, The Times will have to work very hard to keep the time pressure from eroding the quality of either the stories or the supplements.

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Skepticism, something I’ve found too often missing, needs to be nurtured and kept healthier at all levels of editing. While I have not been able to observe firsthand the culture of Times news meetings, it’s my sense that department heads seldom challenge or question the enterprise stories pitched for Page 1 by their peers in charge of other sections. To the extent that this is accurate, encouraging editors at the meetings to feel freer to question or comment on the enterprise stories proposed by fellow department heads might make it harder for the next “too good to be true” story to land on the front page.

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Transparency — explaining the newsroom process and how specific decisions were made — can engage readers and offers accountability that can build credibility.

My columns’ emphasis on the reporting and editing process, plus the online Talk to the Newsroom feature where editors answer questions, have offered readers an expanded view inside the Times newsroom. I continue to believe, as I said in my first column, that greater transparency can help readers better understand the news judgments made by the staff — and hold them more accountable. I have, however, found one disturbing downside: Some readers abuse the transparency by taking an insight it provides and then using it out of context to support or advance their preordained views.

There is one key aspect of transparency that I failed to fully explore as public editor: The Times’s willingness to put its reporting and editing standards in writing exceeds that of many newspapers. It has been encouraging to find the paper’s 2004 “Ethical Journalism” handbook, which has a link on the public editor’s Web page, quoted regularly by readers with a complaint. But The Times’s less-noticed 1999 “Guidelines on Our Integrity,” which I had forgotten about until recently, predates the Jayson Blair fiasco of 2003 and is even more specific on some matters, so I am posting it on The Public Editor’s Journal. Interestingly, although attorneys at many newspapers worry that written rules can be misused by plaintiffs’ lawyers in libel situations, The Times has not lost any court battles in recent years as a result.

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Journalists who take too seriously the old newsroom adage that their job is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” are vulnerable to deciding too quickly that the ends justify some ethically questionable means. I worry about how often even ethical reporters may decide the story they are doing will yield such benefits to society that they are entitled to use questionable means to get it. Editors need to keep this vulnerability in mind and ask tough questions when they encounter it.

The Time’s computer-assisted reporting team, built up in recent years, is making significant contributions and deserves nurturing by top editors. The eight-person team — which includes some of the top people in the field — finds, explores and analyzes data to establish what Terry Schwadron, the technology and information editor, calls “a better starting point for our reporting.” An early contribution: A member of the team helped the reporter Walt Bogdanich sort out fatal railroad accidents for his Pulitzer Prize-winning stories in 2004 on the corporate cover-up of responsibility for those incidents.

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Finally, on a personal note, I want to thank several people who have assisted me over the past two years and reflect a moment about the job of public editor.

Joseph Plambeck, the assistant to the public editor, was absolutely crucial to the functioning of the office. In addition to his wise handling of the thousands of reader e-mails and telephone calls, his astute suggestions for improving my columns have been a significant bonus. The deft touch of Peter Keepnews, a veteran copy editor, repeatedly made clearer what I was trying to say. Casting their experienced eyes over each column as a favor to me were two retired newspaper editors, each with decades of newsroom experience: Glynn Mapes and Frank Swoboda. The monthly column of letters from readers was edited by Susan Kirby.

I want to express special gratitude to all the Times editors and reporters who took time to listen to my questions and answered so often with helpful candor. When I asked editors and reporters to reply to reader complaints, I was repeatedly struck by how many of those readers received genuinely thoughtful responses or explanations — the kind that could put the public editor out of the responding-to-readers business.

It has been an honor to be entrusted to pursue concerns about The Times on behalf of you, the readers, and to monitor the integrity of the journalism practiced by the talented staff of this outstanding newspaper. It has been especially gratifying to hear from those of you whose questions and criticisms showed that you take seriously your obligation to be informed so you can be a more effective citizen in our democracy. I only wish there had been more such critics, those I came to think of as ”citizen readers.” And while you often deserved more breadth and vision than I had to offer, please know that I have given the job my all — for you and for the craft that I love.

Now I invite you to join me in welcoming the third public editor of The Times, Clark Hoyt.

The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page WK14 of the New York edition with the headline: Final Thoughts About My Tenure and The Times’s Future. Today's Paper|Subscribe